The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  It wasn’t easy. Having spent this strange June morning watching oversized radishes bask in the suburban haze, Vladimir had noticed a new and disturbing fact about his father: His father was old. He was a short, bald man, not unlike Vladimir when it came to his slight frame and dark oval face. And although his chest remained firm from the constant fishing and gardening, the black carpet of hair covering it had recently turned gray, his perfect posture had deteriorated, and his long aquiline nose had never looked so frail and thin, the skin around it so sun-wrinkled.

  “You know, if the dollar collapses, and we’re all reduced to an agrarian lifestyle,” Vladimir said, “this one tomato can be an entire entrée.”

  “Why, sure,” the doctor said. “A big vegetable can go a long way. There were times during the war when one carrot would feed a family for days. For instance, during the siege of Leningrad, your grandma and I, well . . .if truth be told, we were nowhere near Leningrad. We fled to the Ural Mountains at the start of the war. But there was nothing to eat there either. All we had was Tolik the Hog. A big fellow—we ate him for five years. We even bartered jars of lard for yarn and kerosene. The whole household ran off that hog.” He looked sadly at his son as if he wished he had saved a tailbone or some other memento. Then he had another idea.

  “Mother!” he shouted to Vladimir’s grandmother, dozing in her wheelchair underneath the giant oaks that delineated the Girshkins’ property from that of their supposedly megalomaniac Indian neighbor. “Remember that hog we had? Tolik?”

  Grandma lifted the brim of her floppy straw hat with her good hand. “What did you say?”

  “Tolik the Hog,” shouted Vladimir’s father.

  Grandma’s eyes widened. “So how come that swine never writes me, that’s what I want to know,” she said, waving a little fist at the doctor and his son. “Boston is close enough, you’d think he’d come down and visit me. I practically raised that bastard after his mother died.”

  “No, not Cousin Tolik,” Dr. Girshkin shouted. “I’m talking about Tolik the Hog. Remember, during the war? In the Urals? He got so big we rode him into town. Remember the hog?”

  “Oh,” said Grandma. “Oh, yes. I remember a beast. But it wasn’t a hog, it was a cow, and her name was Masha.”

  “Masha was after the war!” shouted Dr. Girshkin. He turned to Vladimir. Father and son briefly looked at each other and shrugged, each in his own way.

  “Why would we have a hog?” reasoned Grandma, slowly wheeling herself over from her self-designated post, leaving the oaks defenseless before the Indian and his mythical power saw. “We’re Jewish, aren’t we? Sure, your wife eats that pork salami from the Russian store, and I do too sometimes, because that’s what’s in the refrigerator. But an entire hog?”

  She settled her bewildered gaze on the tomato patch.

  “She’s nearing the sunset, slowly but surely,” said Dr. Girshkin. “Sometimes she thinks there’s two of me. The good Boris and the evil Boris. If I let her guard the oak trees until she falls asleep, and that can be as late as eight or nine o’clock, then I’m the good Boris. The one that’s not married to your mother. If I take her in early, she’ll curse at me like a sailor. And you know that in the autumn it gets damn cold no matter how many jackets I put on her.”

  “That’s what awaits us all,” Vladimir said, which was the Girshkin family’s definitive pronouncement on aging and mortality. It was a perfect time to say it, too, for there they were now, assembled in a perfect row—three generations of Girshkins in sad decline: Grandma getting ready to say good-bye to this world, his father already with one toe in the grave, and Vladimir, the third generation, going through all the motions of a living death.

  But the first to go would be Grandma, that devoted country baba who had once bought Vladimir his first American cotton windbreaker—the only grown-up to realize that his trendy Hebrew school chums were making fun of his ill-fitting overcoat with its inherent East Bloc smell; the only one to understand the pain in being called a Stinky Russian Bear.

  Grandma’s first stroke happened five years ago. For some time she had suspected Tselina Petrovna, her clueless neighbor, of a dastardly plan to denounce her to the Social Security Administration and steal her subsidized apartment. One quiet, snowy night it would happen. The Black Marias would roll up to her building, there would be a knock on the door, and the Social Security Police would drag Grandma away.

  Grandma begged Vladimir to translate a letter of denouncement against Tselina, citing her for being a British spy. Or was it an East German spy? A Russian, French, or Finnish spy? Everything was topsy-turvy in this country. “Tell me what kind of spy!” Grandma shouted at Vladimir.

  Her grandson tried to humor her, but Grandma wept and accused the family of abandoning her. That same night she had the stroke. After the stroke she had a heart attack and then another stroke.

  The doctors were astounded by the resiliency of her body, attributing it to her long life in the countryside. Yet even after she was wheelchair-bound and paralyzed on one side, Grandma could not shake her belief that the Social Security men were due any minute. It happened to her cousin Aaron in Kiev in 1949. A pianist by profession, he had had half his fingers amputated in a frozen Kamchatka labor camp. There were lessons to be learned from that.

  Finally, Vladimir’s father moved Grandma out to the suburbs, where she soon found a new enemy in the face of the “murderous, tree-chopping Hindu” of a neighbor, who had once remarked on the size and beauty of the oak trees straddling the property line. And that’s how her heroic vigil in the backyard began.

  Vladimir stood behind Grandmother patting her sparse hair. He found a space between two moles atop the warm, wrinkled globe of her forehead and kissed her there, eliciting an astonished look from his father, Grandmother’s official keeper. What’s this? Dr. Girshkin seemed to be saying. Co-conspirators in my own house?

  “Of course, there’s no hog, babushka,” Vladimir spoke softly. “Who raises hogs in Westchester? It’s just not done.”

  Grandmother grabbed his hand and bit it affectionately with both of her teeth. “My dear one!” she said. “My only one!” And she was right. They were in this together. Mother and Father may have gone ahead and become rich Americans, but Grandma and Vladimir were still of the same blood, as if a generation had been skipped between them.

  After all, she had raised Vladimir, teaching him to write Cyrillic letters when he was four, awarding two grams of cheese for every Slavonic squiggle mastered. She would take him each Sunday to the Piskaryovko mass grave for the defenders of Leningrad—that most instructive of Russia’s field trips—where they would leave fresh daisies for his grandfather Moysei, a slight, thoughtful man shyly holding on to Grandma’s elbow in wedding photos, who perished in a tank battle on the city’s outskirts. And after this simple reckoning in front of a statue of the Motherland, weeping over an eternal flame, Grandma would ceremoniously tie a red handkerchief around Vladimir’s neck. Asthma or not, she promised him, he would join the Red Pioneers someday and then the Komsomol Youth League and then, if he behaved himself well, the Communist Party. “To fight for the cause of Lenin and the Soviet people, are you ready!” she would drill him.

  “Always ready!” he would shout back.

  But, in the end, the Red Pioneers would have to march on without him . . .In the end, in the late 1970s, to be exact, the gentle, toothy American Jimmy Carter swapped tons of Midwestern grain for tons of Soviet Jews, and suddenly Vladimir and Grandmother found themselves walking out of the International Arrivals Building at JFK. They took one look at the endless America humming her Gershwin tune before them and cried in each other’s arms.

  And this was Grandma today—wheelchair-bound, imprisoned in one of the world’s most expensive backyards, the rustle of stealth station wagons sliding into adjacent driveways, meat burning everywhere, her grandson a grown man with dark circles under his eyes who came to visit his family seasonally, as if they lived in the wilds of Connecticut and n
ot some twenty kilometers beyond the Triborough Bridge.

  Yes, Grandma deserved at least one more kiss from Vladimir, but kissing the old woman in front of his father made Vladimir uncomfortable. Grandmother was Dr. Girshkin’s life, his burden and domain, just as Mother was Vladimir’s. Perhaps after the barbecue, if he still felt this tender and bereft, he could smooch her in private.

  “People! Opa!” They looked up. Mother was leaning out of her third-floor study, waving a bottle of rum. “He’ll be twenty-six soon. Get out that grill!”

  “TODAY I FOUND a new nickname for your father,” Mother announced. “I’m calling him Stalin.”

  “Ha,” Vladimir’s father said, as he stuffed a flaming weenie into a bun for Grandma. “My wife warms my heart like a second sun.”

  “Stalin had very nice whiskers,” Grandma encouraged her boy. “Now, let’s drink, everybody! To Vladimir, our bright American future!”

  Plastic cups were raised. “To our American future!”

  “To our American future!” Mother toasted. “Well, I had a long talk with Vladimir this week, and I think he’s sounding more mature.”

  “Is that true?” asked Dr. Girshkin of his son. “You told her you would become a lawyer?”

  “Don’t peg him, Iosef Vissarionovich,” said Mother, using Stalin’s patronymic. “There are a million mature things Vladimir can become.”

  “Computer,” Grandma grunted. She considered computer programmers as men and women of immense power. The Social Security people were always checking their computer whenever Grandma braved a call to their offices, and they had the power to ruin her life!

  “There you go,” said Mother. “Grandma is crazy, but wise in her own way. I still say, though, you should be a lawyer. You were such a convincing little liar at the debating society, even with that horrific accent of yours. And I know it’s no longer polite to talk about such things, but I must say the money is tremendous.”

  “I hear Eastern Europe is where you make the money these days,” Vladimir said with a knowledgeable air. “This friend of mine, his son owns an import-export business in Prava. A Russian fellow by the name of Groundhog . . .”

  “Groundhog?” Mother shouted. “Did you hear that, Boris? Our son is cavorting with some Russian Groundhog. Vladimir, I expressly forbid you to associate with any Groundhogs from this day forward.”

  “But he’s a businessman,” Vladimir said. “His father, Rybakov, lives in a penthouse. Perhaps he can get a job for me! Why, I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “We all know what kind of businessman calls himself Groundhog,” Mother said. “Where is he from? Odessa? An import-export business! A penthouse! If you want to be in real business, Vladimir, you have to listen to your mother. I’ll help you get a management consulting job at McKinsey or Arthur Andersen. Then, if you’re a good boy, I’ll even pay for your MBA. Yes, that’s the strategy we should pursue!”

  “Prava,” Dr. Girshkin mused, brushing stray drops of Coca-Cola from his whiskers. “Isn’t that the Paris of the 90s?”

  “Are you encouraging him, Stalin?” Mother threw down her hot dog like a gauntlet. “You want him to join the criminal element? Maybe he can be a consultant to your medical practice . . . Help you defraud our poor government. Why should we have only one crook in the family?”

  “Medicare fraud is not really a crime,” Dr. Girshkin said, clasping his hands in a professional manner. “What’s more, my love, all my new patients are paying for your goddamn dacha in Sag Harbor. See, Volodya,” he turned to his son, “there’s a whole wave of Jewish Uzbeks on the way from Tashkent and Bukhara. Such sweet people. So new to Medicare. But it’s just too much work for me. Last week I put in forty hours.”

  “Too much work!” Mother shouted. “Don’t you ever say that in front of Vladimir. That’s where his cult of sloth originates, you know. That’s why he’s keeping company with some Groundhog in his penthouse. He has hardly any role models in this family. I’m the only one who truly works in this house. You just slip your claims into the mailbox. Grandma—you’re a pensioner.”

  Grandma took this to be her cue. “I think he’s getting married to a shiksa,” she said waving an accusative index finger at Vladimir.

  “You’re being crazy again, Mother,” said Dr. Girshkin. “He’s dating Challah. Little Challatchka.”

  “When do we get to meet Challatchka?” asked Vladimir’s mother. “It’s been how long? Almost a year?”

  “How impolite,” said Dr. Girshkin. “What are we . . . savages, that you’re ashamed of us?”

  “She’s in summer school,” Vladimir said. He uncovered the dessert plate full of imported Russian candies from his childhood, the chocolaty Clumsy Bear and the caramel-fudgy Little Cow. “All day long, taking classes,” he mumbled. “She’ll finish medical school in record time.”

  “She really is inspiring,” Mother said. “Women seem more adjusted in this country anyway.”

  “Well, to women,” said Vladimir’s father, raising his cup. “And to the mysterious Challah who keeps our son’s heart!” They toasted. It was time to set the hamburger meat aflame.

  AFTER IT WAS over, Mother lay in her mass-produced four-poster bed, nursing a bottle of rum, while Vladimir paced around her enormous berth lecturing on the topic of the day: Sensitivity to African-Americans. One black marketing director was about to be sacked, and Mother wanted to sack him “in the new, sensitive fashion.”

  In the course of an hour, Vladimir pitted everything he learned during his stint at the progressive Midwestern college against Mother’s peerless Russian racism. “So what are you telling me?” Mother said when the lesson was over. “I should bring up the middle passage?”

  Vladimir tried again to paint the big picture, but Mother was drunk. He told her as much. “So I’m drunk,” said Mother. “You want a drink? Here—wait, no, you might have gotten herpes off that girl. There’s a glass on the dresser.”

  Vladimir accepted a glassful of rum. Mother grabbed a post and hoisted herself up until she was on her knees. “Jesus, our Lord,” she said, “please shepherd helpless Vladimir away from his tragic lifestyle, from the legacy his father bequeathed him, from the pauper’s flat which he calls home, and from this criminal Groundhog . . .” She put her hands together but started to tip over.

  Vladimir caught her by one shoulder. “That’s a pretty prayer, Mother,” he said. “But we’re, you know . . .” He lowered his voice out of habit: “Jewish.”

  Mother looked at his face carefully, as if she had forgotten something and it had gone into hiding beneath one of Vladimir’s thick brows. “Yes, I know that,” she said, “but it’s all right to pray to Jesus. Your grandfather was a gentile, you know, and his father was a deacon. And I still pray to the Jewish God, the main God, although, I have to say, he hasn’t been helping much lately.

  “I mean, what do you think?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” said Vladimir. “I guess it’s all right. Do you feel good when you pray like that? To Jesus and to . . . Isn’t there something else? The Holy Something?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Mother. “I can look it up. I got a little brochure on the subway.”

  “Well, anyway,” Vladimir said, “you can pray to everyone you want, just don’t tell Father. With Grandma losing her mind, he’s been more into the Jewish God than ever.”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing!” Mother said. She grabbed Vladimir and held him against her tiny frame. “We’re so much alike underneath all your stubbornness!” she said.

  Vladimir gently detached himself from his mother and reached for the rum, which he drank from the bottle, herpes be damned. “You look good now,” Mother said. “Like a real man. All you have to do is trim that homo ponytail.” A teardrop formed in the corner of her left eye. Then one in the right. They overfilled and commenced to flow. “I’m not crying hysterically,” Mother assured him.

  Vladimir looked over his mother’s peroxide-blond curls (no longer was she the Mongolka
of Leningrad days). He surveyed the running mascara and soaked blush. “You look good, too,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Thank you,” she sobbed.

  He took out a tissue from his pants pocket and handed it to her. “It’s clean,” he said.

  “You’re a clean boy,” she said, blowing her nose ferociously.

  “I’m glad we had this talk,” he said. “I think it’s time for me to go home now.” He walked over to the largest oak door in Scarsdale, New York, beheld its lucent door knob carved from Bohemian crystal, which he had always been too scared to smudge when he was a teenager; come to think of it, was scared still.

  “Bye-bye,” he said in English.

  There was no answer. He turned around to take one last look. Mother was staring at his feet. “Dosvedanya,” Vladimir said.

  Mother continued to appraise his feet. “I’m leaving,” Vladimir announced. “I’m going to go kiss Grandmother good-bye, then catch the 4:51 train.” The thought of this train cheered him immediately. Express train to Manhattan now departing Scarsdale station. All aboard!

  He was almost out of the woods. He was turning the knob, smudging the Bohemian crystal with all five fingers and a soft, sooty palm, when Mother issued a directive: “Vladimir, walk over to the window,” she said.

  “What’s there?”

  “Quickly, please. Without your father’s trademark hesitation.”

  Vladimir did as he was told. He looked out the window. “What am I looking for?” he asked. “Grandma’s by the oak trees again. She’s throwing branches at the Indian.”

  “Forget your grandma, Vladimir. Walk back to the door. Just as I said, back to the door . . . Left foot, then the right foot . . . Now stop. Turn around. Back to the window once again. Walk naturally, the way you usually walk. Don’t try to control your feet, let them fall where they may . . .” She paused. She cocked her head to one side. She got down on one knee and looked at his feet from a new angle. She got up slowly, wordlessly sizing up her son.